I use the urban area raster data in year [1995,2000,2005,2008,2010,2013] in China to analyze the spatial temporal pattern of urban development.
With ArcGIS and these arcpy code, we can calculate the urban development trend (distance from the center to the farthest cell of urban area) in 8 equal-angle (45°) directions of 205 prefecture-level cities in China. The center of each city is derived from the night time light remote sensing image.